


the wall between us

by dandelionbeach



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003), Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, do not separate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-06
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:16:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29793174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dandelionbeach/pseuds/dandelionbeach
Summary: “I need to speak to the Headmistress.”“Apologies, sir,” The woman says, and the worst part is that she really does sound sorry. “The Headmistress can’t take any calls at the moment. Is there anything else I can do for you?”“Tell her to expect a call from Edward Elric,” He grumbles, and hangs up the phone with an abrupt motion, made clumsy by the shaking in his hands. The plastic clacks against the side of the booth, the black cord swaying free once more, brushing against the coarse, dull fabric of his trousers.
Relationships: Alphonse Elric & Edward Elric, Edward Elric & Alfons Heiderich
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	the wall between us

**Author's Note:**

> im addicted to Conqueror of Shamballa so here's a real life au ^_^
> 
> ed voice FIGURES. ID END UP IN PHILADELPHIA

“Hello, you have reached St. Vincent’s Orphanage, how may I assist you today?”

The tinny voice that rings through the phone is cheerful, and young, refreshed and feminine like it belongs to some soft-eyed, bleeding-heart volunteer. 

Ed twists the phone cord between his fingers. The thick black cord constricts around his knuckles and he hunches further into the receiver, as if to block out the world around. But he couldn’t be paying any less attention to the people who pass him on the street, and the cars that streak past the little phone booth do so in vague, colorless blurs. 

“I need to speak to the Headmistress.” 

Ed prays that his voice will sound confident and sure over the line. It’s about time that St. Vincent’s starts taking him seriously. They know he’s an adult, has been one for what, a year now? 

“Apologies, sir,” The woman says, and the worst part is that she really does sound sorry. “The Headmistress can’t take any calls at the moment. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Tell her to expect a call from Edward Elric ,” He grumbles, and hangs up the phone with an abrupt motion, made clumsy by the shaking in his hands. The plastic clacks against the side of the booth, the black cord swaying free once more, brushing against the coarse, dull fabric of his trousers.

It’s of no surprise to him that he couldn’t get through, but it’s still irritating. The pocket change he used to make that call was nothing short of wasted on it, and he really can’t afford to be in the business of wasting things these days. 

Ed shoves his hands into his now-empty pockets and turns to leave. 

It’s a dreary day out, as it always seems to be since the seasons turned for the bitter. A late autumnal wind sweeps down the road, scattering the stomped-out butts of cigarettes, tugging at Ed’s golden-blond ponytail, carrying a ripped plastic bag up into the uniformly gray sky. 

He swipes loose ends out of his face. For a moment, he indulges in the old fantasy of marching through the city, across the Schuylkill river, up to the front of that old, imposing building. The picture in his mind’s eye is clear as day - the fat, brick wall and the twisted iron gate, the looming and blocky shape beyond that touted such an innocent name. “Saint Vincent’s Orphanage.” The woman who ran it was anything but a saint, as far as Ed was concerned. He’d already tried to confront her, and all it did was set her further in her ways. So sure that he would never be worthy of the title ‘legal guardian’, so dead-set on her righteous quest to keep her impressionable young charge safe from his bad influence.

What a joke.

It would be funny if it wasn’t ruining Ed’s life. 

He sighed deeply, scrubbing at his dry eyes for a moment as if to wipe away the deep-laid bags there. Not quite bruise-purple; not quite matching the black-eye he’d given that bastard last week at the bar. 

Something collides head-on with his gut, and air whooshes from his lungs with a puff.

He stops short, regaining his footing, and looks down to be confronted with the sight of a little girl.

“I’m sorry mister!” She cries out, bringing her chubby fingers up to her mouth and biting at the short nails there. Her cheeks are red, and her hair mussed, but her dress is clean. 

She blinks up at him tearfully, and the spark of irritation that flared hot through his skull fades, suppressed by the sight of shiny, tawny eyes. 

“It’s all right, don’t you worry about me.” Ed smiles, speaking low and soft, like the voice one would use to calm a startled horse. “Are you lost?”

The little girl nods feverishly, pulling her hands away from her mouth long enough to tell him, “I can’t find my mommy.”

“That must be scary,” Ed says, and reaches out to pat her on the head. “Why don’t you wait here with me, and I’ll help you find her, okay?”

“Okay,” she sniffs, and allows him to lead her over to a bench on the sidewalk. At least now he knows what he’ll be doing for the foreseeable future. He didn’t expect to spend the rest of his afternoon perched on one of the city’s many cold, hostile benches next to an unfamiliar kid, but here they are. 

“Are you lost too, mister?” 

“No, I know my way around,” He laughs, “When you’re big like me, you get to go all over the city, all by yourself. But for now,” and she watches him intently with those big eyes, “you have to stay with someone. Kids shouldn’t be out all alone.” 

She nods, in that serious way that children do when taking things to heart. 

The whole scene is so familiar to Ed, like he could close his eyes for a moment and someone else would be sitting next to him. Like if he didn’t look at her she could be whoever he wanted. The spell doesn’t last for long.

“Who did you walk around with when you were little?” The girl asks, her breathing steady now, swinging her legs back and forth beneath the bench, out of synch. 

“My brother. ” Ed replies fondly, but the word feels clumsy on his tongue. “He and I, we’d go all over and get into loads of trouble.” 

Maybe he shouldn't tell her that, in case she decides to emulate him, or something. He did just assign himself the task of watching over her. 

“Uh,” Ed flounders for a moment, searching for some suitable life-lesson to tell her. “Don’t do that, though. Behave.” 

Not like he ever behaved in his life, but she didn’t need to know that.

She giggles, her lips peeling back as she grins at him wide, with crooked teeth. “Let’s be friends,” she says.

When some frantic, harried woman, with the look of someone who lost the most important thing in the world slapped across her face, stumbles over her short heels in her haste to come down the street, Ed knows it has to be her mother. 

The girl shrieks, delighted, and barrels into her mother’s waiting arms without a backwards glance.

***

Paper, paper, paper, sheaves of it rustling, pages sliding together with that dry sound, dragging at the oil of his fingertips, smudging his hands blue with old ink, the edges too worn soft to cut, the corners dog-eared and ragged and smelling of dust, the lines blurring together in the low yellow lantern light, black on cream. A stain. 

“Hey.”

A stray line of ink skitters across the page as Ed startles up, half-turning jerkily in the rickety wooden chair at the rickety wooden desk as he resurfaces from the slog of legal jargon. The furniture creaks as Ed relaxes at the sight of his roommate. How the time flies when one is entrenched in boring paperwork. He spits out the pen-cap clutched between his teeth, and tries for a smile. 

“Evening, Alfons,” Ed sighs, leaning forward on the back of the chair. “How was class today?”

“Fine, fine,” Alfons slings down his shoulder-bag onto the threadbare couch, and pointedly does not look at him. One of his textbooks slides out onto the cushion. “You didn’t miss much. This time, at least.” 

Ed turns back to the documents strewn across his desk, picks one up at random, scanning it sightlessly, and hopes to whatever passes as a higher power around here that Alfons doesn’t start. 

“You know you can’t keep skipping.” 

Here we go. Point 852 to Ed, point 0 to God’s existence. Alfons' not finished yet.

“You’re really smart, but what if you lose your scholarship? You’ve worked so hard but we can barely afford to live here as is, and if your grades drop too far I won’t be able to support us both, much less Alpho-”

“I know!” Ed snaps, smacking the paper back onto the desk. If one more person insinuates that he’s not trying hard enough, he might just scream. Instead, his hands curl into fists. “I know, okay? It’s not like I don’t want to go to college. I swear to god I’m going to be an engineer, it’s kind of been my whole life plan since I was ten, but a degree, even a real, living-wage job won’t mean anything if I can’t do this first. I’m not stupid.” 

There’s no response. Through his own heavy breaths, Ed can hear his roommate shifting around in the background. 

“I got us cheesesteaks,” Alfons says finally. “You didn’t eat today, did you?”

“Oh my god,” Ed groans, abandoning his desk to slink over to the kitchen. “What would I do without you?” 

Alfons just smiles, turning his head demurely to the side, and unwraps their dinner. 

They're quiet for a while, and Ed enjoys the first moment of contentment he's had all day. 

“So,” Alfons says diplomatically, putting down the remnants of his dinner, “What did you do today?”

Ed studies him for a long moment, notes the way Alfons' eyebrows pull together over his brilliantly blue eyes. Briefly, he considers lying, or brushing it off, or anything else that would have him shoulder this burden alone. But Alfons already knew more about him than nearly anyone alive. So Ed might as well talk. He could dig his grave and lie in it, too. 

“I called the orphanage,” he confesses. “Didn’t get through. Not that anything would happen if I did...” Ed’s voice trails off as he mutters to himself, picking at the paper his dinner came in, tearing it in thin strips. 

How many arguments had he had with that woman? Not only in the past year, in phone booths and letters, but in all the years before, when he was still a child, and they fought face to face? It never goes anywhere.

“She can’t really be that bad, right?” Alfons tries, “I mean, she’s taken care of kids her whole life. She’s got to have a heart.”

“Well, if she does have one, it’s all shriveled up,” Ed scoffs. “Maybe it’s even as black as mine is.”

Alfons rolls his eyes at that, but he’s smiling when he says, “But really, you’re going to get through to her eventually. She can’t keep you apart forever, no matter how hard she tries. You’re doing fine. All well adjusted and everything.”

“I didn’t think missing more school than everyone else combined and working as a free-lance handyman counted as ‘well adjusted’. But whatever you say.”

Despite his deflection, Ed finds some bit of comfort in their conversation. What his roommate said is true. Once a child turns eighteen, once a child is no longer a child, St. Vincent’s Orphanage and Headmistress Baker no longer have legal jurisdiction. But there’s no way he can wait that long. Too much time has already passed, and Ed’s convinced that waiting another four years of this would be analogous to suicide.

“I’m serious.” Alfons says, batting his wad of trash across the table, and Ed doesn’t have to try for a smile this time.

He inhales deeply. “I know. Just, I can’t help but think it would be okay if I could at least talk to him,” He murmurs. “We’ve never been apart this long.”

***

They’re in the yard, the grass green and technicolor. Shocks of yellow dandelion push up out of the ground so much more easily than they do out in the real world, flowering without fighting up through concrete. 

“Al?” he calls out, the heat of the summer sun sneaking beneath the skin on his exposed shoulders, turning them red. The distinct smell of pollen tickles his nose. “Alphonse, get over here! Quit running off alone.”

“Sorry. I was just thinking about climbing the wall.”

When Alphonse speaks, Ed can’t hear his voice. When he turns towards him, Ed can’t see any of the detail on his face. That can’t be right. The person before him should have a face he knows well, a face he loves enough to look beneath, but he can’t seem to make out the features. It’s just the vague, dreamy knowledge of what is and is not that tells Ed he’s looking at his brother.

“That never works, it’s too tall,” Ed feels himself reply. “Headmistress would be furious, and besides, that’s not the right way to get out of here.” But his heart isn’t in the words.

Ed’s thinking somewhere behind himself, panic threatening to slip through the cracks in the dream like slow-moving molasses. He can’t tell how to fix this.

What’s the color of Al’s hair? How long is it, by now? How exactly did the freckles line up on his face? Where are the old lines of scar tissues on his body - and are there any new ones? Is he still too thin, is he eating enough, could he have hit a growth spurt while Ed was away? 

What if, the next time they see each other, he’s someone else?

Ed tries to conjure up the image of his little brother’s face but all he can think of are teary eyes, blinking up at him from a bench seat on the sidewalk. 

His eyelids slide open, and he stares into the blackness of his empty room.

***

It’s the dead of morning.

Soft pink light emanates from the horizon, kissing the harsh gray lines of the city block, making the buildings melt. 

The city is as quiet as it ever gets, and his breath clouds in the air. If there’s a time to do this, it’s now.

From where he’s crouched in the bare-armed, prickling bushes, Ed gazes up at the red brick wall with trepidation. He scrapes the pads of his fingers against it, feels the roughness of the stone, feels the way it would rip up his skin if he dared to try and claw his way over it. 

The prospect of pain doesn’t scare him. It’s just another grim reality to accept, push down, and move on from. 

Here’s a grim reality that Headmistress Baker should soon accept: 

Nothing in this world can keep Edward Elric from his little brother.


End file.
